One of the most terrible pitched battles between Christians and Muslims—Kosovo II, which took a total of three carnage-soaked days to conclude (October 17-20)—reached its bloody climax today.
The year was 1448, and the Ottoman Turks had been invading and terrorizing the Balkans for several years. One of the staunchest Christian foes of the Muslims, John Hunyadi, governor of Hungary, decided enough was enough, as evident in a letter he wrote to the pope on September 17:
[T]he enemy attacks our neighbors [the Serbs], incites [them] to war against us. We have decided to attack him instead of waiting for him to attack us. We have had enough of our men enslaved, our women raped, wagons loaded with the severed heads of our people, the sale of chained captives, the mockery of our religion…. [W]e shall not stop until we succeed in expelling the enemy from Europe.
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